I’m usually a pretty positive person, especially about WoW. I don’t play a wide assortment of games, so I can’t rant about how other games do this better or that differently. I pretty much focus on WoW, and I appreciate everything I get, for better or for worse.

I even tolerated/enjoyed the Garrison. I guess I’m ok with Facebook-type click games, even though I don’t play them on Facebook.

And now the prepatch went live. And I spent several hours playing.

First, the positives.

Kudos to Blizzard on the patch rollout. It was pretty seamless. The servers were up on time and pretty stable. Not 100%, but much better than a typical major patch day.

The Wardrobe system is nice, but not perfect. I did find a few items in my bags that were not listed in the interface anywhere. I also don’t like that the hoops you have to jump through to hide your helmet and cloak. Still, it is a big improvement.

And I got my Fabulous title 🙂

The new animations are fun. I enjoy watching my rogue attack and seeing the subtleties in his movements.

But now my criticism. I went online yesterday. Here’s what I did:

I played around with the transmog system a bit, but I’m not a big ‘mogger so that didn’t hold my interest.

I emptied some of my bags and bank of old ‘mog gear. I didn’t clean them out entirely because a lot of what I have are mementos and odd items rather than transmog stuff.

I crafted and auctioned some shirts, Tomes of Illusion, and glyphs.

I attacked a target dummy for a while to play with new talents. But with no real new abilities, that didn’t excite me.

So, now, here is what I have facing me.

there is no new content right now.

In fact, without the Garrison gold missions, I actually have *less* stuff to do now

The new auction items are not generating the excitement and sales that we hoped for, so gold-making is rough at the moment

Characters are nerfed due to ability pruning and ability scaling, so game play feels… meh

My son, who is 13, complained that his DK was now boring to play.

This is NOT the way to build hype for the expansion. I have played continuously for almost 10 years, making gold as a filler activity when I had no content to run. Today, for one of the few times n that span, I feel like I have no reason to log on at all.

My one hope is that my kids will play with me. They activated their accounts this month, and I’d like a chance to run a family instance. Their schedules don’t coincide well with mine, though, so its harder than you’d think to set that up. Plus, no one plays a tank (typical).

Now I’m just killing time until Demonic Invasions begin. That’s an inauspicious way to introduce the new expansion.